Georgia state senate unilaterally votes to annex parts of Tennessee

Well, they didn’t exactly say that, but they did vote to move the state line north to encompass part of the Tennessee River and it’s hard to see how they are going to accomplish that if there isn’t a little bit of invasion going on.

Central to the problem is this: Georgia needs water. Over 99% of the state was under some kind of draught conditions last year. The Tennessee River, which runs right next to the state border between Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama, can provide lots of fresh water for Georgia. So Georgia has decided to move the state line to gain access to it.

“The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has identified the Tennessee River as a likely source of water for North Georgia,” State Senator David Shafer said as he presented the resolution, reported the Times Free Press. “Yet the state of Tennessee has used mismarked boundary lines to block our access to this important waterway.”

Tennessee is not especially impressed by this move.

“We aren’t certain where Sen. Shafer got his information, but TVA is not involved in this discussion at this point,” TVA spokesman Scott Brooks told the Times Free Press.

It’s also unclear how Georgia could move the state line without the consent of Tennessee or the U.S. Federal government.

The push to move the state line is based on a land survey which would place the section of the river in question within Georgia. The catch? The survey was done 200 years ago.

What are the Georgia state senators basing their claims on? A nearly 200-year-old land survey. That survey, drawn in 1818, put the Georgia-Tennessee border one mile south of where it should have been, denying Georgia access to the bountiful, and perhaps inappropriately named, Tennessee River, which, as Sen. Shafer points out, is fed in part by Georgia water.

Left out in all of this is Alabama, which faced terrible droughts of its own last year and controls, in the northeastern corner of its state, a part of the Tennessee River. As an impartial observer born and raised in Georgia, I can assure you that not only is Tennessee in the wrong … but also that no one cares about Alabama.